[Next, Ephixis led the group through one defensive line after another, finally arriving at the destination of this operation—the Imperial Star Language Court.]
[The Star Language Court is the Imperium's information-transmission network, responsible for super-luminal communication between every region of the Empire.]
[It recruits Spirit Lamp Wielders and trains them; those who graduate become sanctioned Spirit Lamp Wielders.]
[The institution oversees specially trained Astropaths who, by channeling their Lantern force, can speak across interstellar distances with other Neo-Plume users, binding the scattered Worlds of the Imperium into one galaxy-spanning whole.]
[When Ephixis reached the fortress gate, he recognized the slab was forged from blast-thermopattern alloy—so tough even a Titan's volcano cannon would struggle to breach it.]
[Any weapon powerful enough to shatter the gate would obliterate the Astropaths waiting behind it.]
[Just as the others assumed they would have to turn back empty-handed, Ephixis spoke: "So long as it's a door, there's always a way to open it."]
[A green, pus-covered sprite promptly scuttled out—his personal key.]
[This was why Nurgle's earlier "gift" of Death-shrouds had been bestowed: they were sacrificial offerings.]
[Offering one's life to Nurgle is, of course, considered a blessing.]
[Under the Nurgling's spell, the gate swung open.]
[Ephixis, the Nurgling, and a clutch of Chaos Spawn strode toward the unsuspecting Astropaths, and at last he revealed the grand design.]
[Ephixis had incubated an unprecedented mind-virus inside Morian's body; the pathogen could spread via Psykers.]
[Because Astropaths must route their messages through the Warp, Father Nurgle used the infected seers to disseminate viral data, then exploited the Warp's temporal confusion to infect future Astropaths.]
[Those future carriers would relay the contagion to every warship, and through the Warp—and Nurgle's power—the outbreak's consequences would be ferried back into the past, to the very moment Ephixis encountered the Imperial Navy, completing a flawless causal loop.]
DC Universe
"Click."
A soft sound; John Constantine's trembling fingers finally brought the cigarette to life.
He dragged hard, but the nicotine's fleeting calm couldn't quiet the tempest roaring inside his soul.
He stared at the darkened screen, every trace of his habitual smirk gone, replaced by a pallor of horror and disbelief.
"Shit…" he muttered, barely audible, the smoke itself seeming to carry frost.
"Hey, Constantine," Batman's low voice cut through the gloom, "from your 'professional' standpoint—what is this?"
Constantine didn't answer at once. He inhaled again, filling his lungs with acrid heat, then spoke in a rasp:
"This… this is past anything my so-called 'profession' can explain, Bruce."
"The devils and fallen Angels I know—they lend, they contract, they twist hearts—but they still play by the basic rules!"
"It's like running a casino: you can cheat, but you can't kick down the vault door, grab the cash, and declare yourself the winner. That's not gambling—it's robbery!"
His voice cracked with fury, drawing every eye.
"This Nurgle thing is robbing reality itself! It shoves its hand straight into the timeline and drags tomorrow's events into today!"
"That's not the point, John."
Superman spoke, anger simmering, his normally warm blue eyes now an icy abyss.
"The point is, it makes everything meaningless. Resistance, courage, sacrifice—when the enemy can simply declare the ending, what's left of our struggle? It's the murder of hope itself."
"No, no, Big Blue, you still don't get it!" Constantine leapt up, pacing in agitated strides, his coat trailing the stink of smoke.
"You think that's the worst of it? Wrong!" He jabbed a finger toward the screen, terror Stark in his eyes.
"The real horror is that he dared to do it—and nothing's happened to him!"
"Meaning?" Wonder Woman Diana frowned.
"Meaning reality has an immune system, lady!"
Constantine was almost shouting.
"You twist its 'now' that hard, it bites back—time paradoxes, causal whirlpools, reality collapses—there's always a price!"
"The mightiest mage I know tiptoes through timelines like a burglar, terrified of waking the watchdogs!"
He stopped, meeting each Leaguer's gaze, and enunciated every word:
"And this Nurgle, this pus-bloated blob, simply doesn't care! He withered an entire fleet as casually as weeding a garden. What does that tell us?"
His eyes swept the room, his own shudder audible.
"It means either reality's backlash is a joke to him—
or that Universe's immune system is already dead, too diseased to fight off any virus."
"Whichever answer proves true," he crushed the butt and nervously lit another, "for the people of that World it's the ultimate nightmare."
Silence thickened, heavier than before.
"He's exploiting a rules loophole," Batman's voice rang out again, cold and analytical.
"The narration mentioned the Warp—a dimension where time is tangled. It also spoke of Astropaths, those who send messages with their minds."
"Nurgle isn't striking at the 'now'; he's striking at the 'future,' then using the chaotic Warp as a springboard to reflect the outcome back to the present. He's built a perfect, self-closing causal weapon."
He paused, his voice dropping even lower.
"This is information warfare—an attack on the conceptual plane. Its target isn't the battleship, but the very idea that 'the battleship exists.' You can't physically defend against a result that already 'has happened.'"
For the first time, the heroes collectively felt powerless.
All their strength, their intellect, everything they believed in, paled before a deeper rule set that could redefine victory at will.
Constantine slumped back into his chair, buried his face in his hands, and muttered over and over,
"We're done... all done... these spandex-clad fools finally realize the Universe isn't run by who punches hardest."
Marvel Universe
"No—no, Friday, recalculate!" Stark instinctively ordered the air, then stopped with a bitter laugh.
For the first time, his hyper-speed mind blue-screened from data it couldn't process.
"This isn't war; it's a hack."
His voice was dry, yet his eyes flickered with the dread-laced excitement only a tech maniac could feel.
"They're not hitting the physical layer—they've cracked causality, the Universe's bottom-most OS. They aren't traveling through time; they're compiling it!"
"They've taken the 'program finished' result and thrown it into the 'program start' phase. This... this is the ultimate, undefendable zero-day!"
"We need a Reality Firewall—something that locks the current time-node and refuses any malicious packets from the future... a patch against temporal paradox for the whole damn Universe!" He rattled off words, already seeing new armor blueprints.
"It's not a program, Tony."
Captain America's voice cut in.
Steve Rogers stood as upright as ever, but incomprehension and fury filled his blue eyes—the look of a soldier facing an enemy he can't grasp.
"This is a war you can't join. We're trained to charge, to hold the line until the last breath. We believe that if we're still standing, the line holds."
"But this foe tells you the line already fell in the future. It strips us of our right to fight."
His words hit harder than any tech brief. This wasn't hope shattering; it was the Death of struggle itself.
"It won't even face you."
Steve's voice sank. "It turns every plan, every ounce of courage, every sacrifice into a joke. This isn't war—it's a coward's trick."
"Exactly! There's no honor in it!"
Thor Odinson surged to his feet, crackling lightning dancing round his hammer. His rage, storm-bright, showed pure Asgardian scorn for such vileness.
"My father once conquered the Nine Realms; we have faced tricksters before!"
"Yet even Loki's foulest ploys had to play out in reality. This thing called Nurgle won't even step onto the battlefield!"
"It hides at time's end like a craven serpent, dripping future venom into past prey."
Thor's roar echoed through the chamber.
"This deserves no name of battle! It's mere theft of victory! We sing of glorious Death—while they make the foe rot in a fight that never was. It's the ultimate insult to every warrior's soul!"
Yet the deepest terror came from the calmest voice.
Dr. Bruce Banner adjusted his glasses, his face ghastly pale. As a top physicist, he saw the very bedrock of reality crumbling.
"The Second Law of Thermodynamics... the Arrow of Time..."
He whispered, voice trembling uncontrollably.
"All our physics rests on one axiom: cause precedes effect. It's irreversible, linear. Entropy always increases; time moves ever forward."
He lifted his gaze to Tony, eyes wide with a terror never seen before.
"Tony, don't you get it? What it did isn't just an 'attack.'"
"It's telling us the source code of our Universe can be edited at will!"
"Today it drags decay into the present; tomorrow could it paste the Universe's heat-Death right here, right now?"
"Every constant we know—Lightspeed, Gravity, Planck's constant—to them might be lines of code ready for deletion or rewrite."
Banner's voice sank, ever more hopeless.
"We don't live in a solid cosmos; we live in a document that can be overwritten any second. And that thing called Nurgle... just showed us it has admin rights."
At that, every Avenger fell silent.